Pearce recounts health care bill process, praises HMS

(Press Staff Photo by Benjamin Fisher)Congressman Steve Pearce speaks about healthcare at a private event hosted by HMS last week.

U.S. Congressman Steve Pearce, of New Mexico’s 2nd District, visited Hidalgo Medical Services on Monday to celebrate National Health Center Week and to explain Republican attempts to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act — Obamacare — and his role therein.

The Republicans’ attempt to replace the health care act this summer was largely secretive, long foreseen and eventually unsuccessful. But it had eyes glued to screens across the world. And, according to Pearce, was as tumultuous as it seemed from afar.

Pearce explained to a group of HMS higher-ups, and local and state dignitaries what steps he took during Congress’ part in the process and why. He was especially vocal about why he held out against the House Republicans’ original bill.

“If you were watching carefully, you would know that I was one of the 34, shrinking down to 25, to 24 votes of Republicans standing against the Republican bill,” he said. “I did that because I feel the Affordable Care Act is in the process of turning inward, and you never know if it’s going to collapse or not.”

Pearce claimed that high costs and low penalties have led many young healthy people to “bail out” of the Affordable Care Act, which in turn has driven costs even higher. He also said that most health care exchanges, established on the taxpayers’ dime, had gone bankrupt, and lost many large insurers like Anthem and Blue Cross Blue Shield.

Even so, he said the original Republican bill was even worse. So, he refused to vote in its favor, earning the ire of President Donald Trump.

“There are definitely problems, but the first bill was going to be worse off,” Pearce said. “So I got sent to the ‘principal’s office,’ with the ‘principal.’ You know from TV, he’s powerful and you don’t want to be close to him in opposition.”

There, too, Pearce claimed he did not fold.

“So, I am sitting there and he’s saying, ‘I need your vote,’” the congressman began in a play-by-play. “It wasn’t a question of whether the bill was good or bad, it was just ‘I need your vote.’ I said, ‘Sir, I’m not going to give it to you.’ He [Trump] said, ‘You didn’t hear me. I want your vote.’ I said, ‘I have 700,000 voting for me. I represent them, not New York. You don’t vote for New Mexico.’ He was pretty gracious right then, but then Tweeted that he was going to get someone to run against me in the primary, so he can be pretty mercurial.”

He said, though, that he believes certain Republicans’ determination eventually taught the president humility, or at least tempered his hubris.

“He’s come to the realization, I think, that he cannot give orders and it occur,” Pearce said.

Pearce said this is the second time his refusal to play along with his party has gotten him the cold shoulder. He said former Republican House Speaker John Boehner told him he was “not a good team player.”

“So, if you’ve ever been placed in the outer darkness of the political sphere, I can describe in detail what it looks like,” Pearce said. “That’s OK, because I’m still there. Mr. Boehner is not.”

Southern New Mexico’s congressman said that the House Republicans’ next attempt was only “modestly better” than the first, but that he had trusted in the system to get the right bill once all was said and done. So, he voted with the Republican majority to pass it on to the Senate.

There, he said on Monday, he hoped that the Senate would make changes and send the bill to a committee of both houses to come up with a final, and better, version he would be happy with. But, in an 11th-hour vote, Sens. Susan Collins (R-ME) and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) preceded Arizona Sen. John McCain in defeating the bill. Pearce criticized McCain’s actions as obstructing progress for personal reasons.

“So, the vote that Mr. McCain made — he’s the one that later said, ‘Let’s see if he makes America great again now’ — it appeared to be a personal vote,” Pearce said. “What it did was, it shut the process down. We don’t have 60 votes to get it to the floor. And we have one bill a year we can take to the floor with 51 votes, it’s called reconciliation. It has to fit within very specific categories and this was the one bill. So when he cast the vote to stop the bill, he shut it down. You can talk about the bill for the rest of the year, you can not vote on it, but once you vote, it shuts down.”

Pearce said he could not predict the repeal’s future.

“Democrats will quietly agree in Congress that there are problems,” he said. “But now the process has shut down and there’s no other vehicle to carry it. I don’t know what will happen to it. It’s just how the process works. The Founding Fathers wanted something where it was hard to pass legislation and they succeeded.”

But, he attempted to calm any concerns HMS personnel had about the health center allocations he and the state’s other, Democratic, caucus members in Washington, D.C., have secured over the past decades.

“Of all the sausage making, appropriations are the messiest, so I won’t describe in detail how those are made,” he said. “But, know that your funding is going to be OK.”

Democratic Sens. Martin Heinrich and Tom Udall could not make it to the celebration of Health Center Week on Monday, but sent along reps and videos praising the work HMS does and promising their support.

Pearce was on a break from the campaign trail for governor of New Mexico on Monday. He said that, so far, his team has focused on sowingname recognition in the two congressional districts he does not represent in the state, north of U.S. 40, which requires much travel and at least six hours on the phone per day.